Untitled Linux Show 267 Transcript

Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.
 

Jonathan Bennett [00:00:00]:
This week we're talking about the 7.2 kernel. It's finally out and there's some interesting news already around 7.3. Drivers are getting dropped and there's an AI storm that the developers are having to deal with. And then Canonical is looking to automate the move from C to Rust. Omarchi launches the Omicom Foundation with $8 million. NVIDIA's GeForce Now is officially on Linux and a lot more. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned. Podcasts you love.

Jeff Massie [00:00:31]:
From people you trust.

Ken McDonald [00:00:35]:
This is TWiT.

Jonathan Bennett [00:00:38]:
This is the Untitled Linux Show, episode 267, recorded Saturday, August 22nd. I used to be cool. Hey folks, it is Saturday and it is time to geek out about Linux and hardware and software. We've got a new kernel release. We've got A mini, not quite rants, but interesting stories from the Linux kernel mailing list. We're talking Canonical, a whole bunch of stuff. It's going to be great. Get in here.

Jonathan Bennett [00:01:03]:
I've got the guys. We are, well, 3 of us are back. One is still playing hooky. I got Ken and I got Jeff and we've got some fun stuff to talk about. How are you guys today?

Ken McDonald [00:01:17]:
Struggling with the bit trying to get out.

Jonathan Bennett [00:01:19]:
He's struggling with the bit. Yeah, I think we all are. Jeff, did you want to talk about that thing that you mentioned before the show started? Is that something you want to mention here?

Jeff Massie [00:01:30]:
No, we'll just—

Jonathan Bennett [00:01:31]:
Okay. Jeff has a thing, but we're not going to talk about it. We're just going to go on. I had a thing this week too, and I probably shouldn't talk about it either. So, you know, this is a show of things we're not going to talk about. I don't know how well that's going to work for the podcast. But anyway, we do have some things we are going to talk about. And Jeff is going to lead the charge on that.

Jonathan Bennett [00:01:49]:
And that is we've got a new kernel.

Ken McDonald [00:01:53]:
And the kernel's name is?

Jonathan Bennett [00:01:55]:
Oh, I don't know. There's probably a code name for it. Jeff, do you know what's the code? If you want to, you can talk about 7.2 and I'll go look up the code names. I don't remember what we're at.

Jeff Massie [00:02:04]:
Yeah, I don't know what the code name is. I mean, 27 Herbs and Spices. So Linus Torvalds released version 7.2 of the kernel on August 16th. What's new, you ask? Well, the update adds several new features aimed at improving performance, expanding hardware support, and cleaning up old code. One of the biggest changes is the new approach to how the kernel schedules tasks across the computer processor cores. The update introduces cache-aware scheduling, which we've talked about before on the show, but the really short version of it is the system tries to keep related tasks running on processor cores that share the same cache. Keeping tasks together like this cuts down on the unnecessary data movement between cores, which improves overall speed. When you do things like jump NUMA nodes, you gain latency because even though all the cache, for example, can talk to each other, you have another step instead of going— the core is talking to one cache.

Jeff Massie [00:03:02]:
Now the cache has to transfer data to the other cache and then transfer it to the core. So it just adds overhead. So the more you can be cache aware and understand the topography of your CPU, the better off you are. 7.2 also introduces a new scheduler, a GPU scheduler. Yes, I said GPU, graphics processing unit. Described as fairer, this system is designed to keep interactive programs responsive even when the graphics card is under a heavy workload. without slowing down the other tasks running on the system. Pretty much like a task scheduler, you know, like you'd have for the CPU, but just for GPU workloads.

Jeff Massie [00:03:46]:
So it kind of, kind of the same overall theory, just making sure that one, one process doesn't just bog the entire system down. But speaking of task scheduler, the default fairer setting, which was for the, for the CPU scheduler, as well. It was getting— it's getting reverted back to the standard FIFO, first in first out, since there was a late regression found. So it'll probably show up, you know, they'll probably fix it. It'll probably show up in 7.3. Uh, the release brings several updates for graphics hardware. You know, one such example is the AMD graphics cards using the AMD GPU driver now have initial support for HDMI 2.1. fixed-rate link feature, and we have talked about that.

Jeff Massie [00:04:35]:
This allows for higher bandwidth connections to newer displays. On the processor side, the kernel added support for Intel's upcoming Panther Lake-R series of chips. We had more Rust expansion in this release. 7.2 adds Rust language support for IBM System/390 mainframe, along with support for a Rust library called ZeroCopy, which helps programs handle memory more efficiently. File systems also received some love. The BTRFS or ButterFS, BetterFS file system now uses large folios where multiple memory pages, which is, I mean, sorry, it now uses large folios. Large folios is where multiple memory pages are grouped into a single large unit by default, Which reduces overhead and thusly speeds up the file system. So let's think of it kind of like instead of going, oh, I need this chunk of memory, I need this chunk of memory, I need this chunk of memory, it can just grab a bunch of those memory pages at once.

Jeff Massie [00:05:40]:
So it's like, you can think of it like files. Instead of grabbing one file at a time, as in file folders, paper for you kids out there, you can just grab a whole stack at once. Saves on trips. The SMB file system, commonly used for sharing files across networks, gained support for compressed files now. So that'll give you a little bit of a speedup. Developers also used this release to remove old unused code. The kernel formally dropped the long-deprecated string copy function. And like I said, it's deprecated because it's been marked for removal removal for some time.

Jeff Massie [00:06:21]:
They finally just got rid of it in 7.2. 7.2 also removed more old 486 code, basically making the Pentium the new lowest standards. Now, if you have a 486 or older machine, then you need to run an older kernel version. Though I also have a link to a video in the show notes where they talk about, you know, realistically, how many of those old 486 systems are running today are going to be using a modern kernel. They're probably going to stay on their old 2.x or 4.x kernel and chug away till they die. A lot of these are in kind of more like appliances where you're not running the latest greatest operating system because they did make the 486 for quite a while, but it was then— You know, running things like washing machines, internet of things, internet devices of things, you know, kind of low-end stuff like that. So not stuff you're just going to be chomping at the bit to go, hey, we got to have the newest kernel. Take a look at the 3 articles and 1 video linked in the show notes for more details.

Jeff Massie [00:07:32]:
And as I say a lot, there's a ton of fixes, features, and updates I didn't cover for the sake of brevity. And they go into much more detail and link to the actual updates. So you can see everything that changed. And right now, the merge window is open for 7.3, and we'll keep everyone up to date on all the new features making the pull requests in the upcoming weeks. So happy reading.

Jonathan Bennett [00:07:59]:
Yeah, so we've got some more news later in the show. I'm tempted to actually dive into it right after this, but as to why some of those old things are getting removed from the kernel, it basically boils down down to, in the past, all that code could just sit there and, you know, it was pretty static and nobody cared.

Ken McDonald [00:08:16]:
Nobody looked at it.

Jonathan Bennett [00:08:17]:
And nobody looked at it. Now we're at the point where it's being looked at again and people suddenly care because reasons. We'll get into the reasons. But yeah, 7.2 looks pretty exciting, really interesting. It doesn't have— so the one thing that I'm really looking forward to is the full AMD HDMI 2.1 support. And I don't think that's in there yet. It's not complete, at least. Last time I checked, we were gonna have to wait for either 7.3 or 7.4, depending upon when everything landed and turned on by default.

Ken McDonald [00:08:48]:
Let's hope we don't have to wait for 8.

Jonathan Bennett [00:08:52]:
Indeed. 8's gonna be quite a ways away. They generally go to like 7.19, the .19, and then instead of doing a .20, they'll jump to the next big major version.

Ken McDonald [00:09:02]:
Because you've already had a Ziventat. 2 and putting a 0 after, it's going to confuse things.

Jeff Massie [00:09:08]:
See, I thought—

Jonathan Bennett [00:09:08]:
I mean, they, no, they do a .10. There are multiple ways that versioning can work. Some of it makes more sense than others.

Ken McDonald [00:09:18]:
My jokes are terrible.

Jonathan Bennett [00:09:19]:
Well, yeah, we knew that already. Yeah.

Jeff Massie [00:09:21]:
Okay.

Ken McDonald [00:09:22]:
Yeah.

Jeff Massie [00:09:22]:
And you are, I was thinking they had 2.1 fully turned on, but you're right. It's still initial support. So yeah, it's not—

Jonathan Bennett [00:09:31]:
Parts of it have landed. I think it's off by default. And yes, I don't think quite enough of it has landed in 7.2 for it to be really good yet.

Ken McDonald [00:09:41]:
But it's all in the graphics card itself.

Jonathan Bennett [00:09:47]:
Well, yeah, if you mean that you can do it without running a dongle. So that's what I'm doing right now because the monitor behind me, it's only got HDMI. It does not have DisplayPort or anything else. So I've got DisplayPort and then a dongle to convert that back to HDMI 2.1.

Ken McDonald [00:10:01]:
So it doesn't even have a VGA port?

Jonathan Bennett [00:10:04]:
No, I don't think it does. I don't think they make cards with VGA ports on them anymore. Or if they do, it's on like the little header, the, what would be a blank PCI, PCIe cover.

Ken McDonald [00:10:17]:
Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [00:10:17]:
And then they just, they chop out the bits to where that you can put a VGA plug in there. And then it's just on a ribbon cable. I've seen that on graphics cards. Although I don't know that they do that anymore. I mean, VGA is old.

Ken McDonald [00:10:30]:
That's expensive to do.

Jeff Massie [00:10:33]:
Well, and for— they haven't made VGA monitors for a long time. I mean, why? Because even if you're— I don't know of a reason why you would do it unless you had some weird custom hardware you were trying to interface to and you'd have to special make hardware.

Ken McDonald [00:10:49]:
10-year-old VGA?

Jonathan Bennett [00:10:51]:
Yeah, at this point, probably what they do is just you get an HDMI to VGA converter and it's nothing more than an FPGA on the inside, right? That's what those are anymore. All right. Well, let's move on. Ken, let's talk Canonical. Unless, Jeff, you had something else to jump in there.

Jeff Massie [00:11:10]:
Oh, I was going to say, Ken, you might want to lower your mic just a touch.

Ken McDonald [00:11:14]:
Am I a little bit loud?

Jonathan Bennett [00:11:15]:
No, he's hiding behind it.

Jeff Massie [00:11:16]:
No, you were kind of hiding.

Ken McDonald [00:11:19]:
Bouncing?

Jeff Massie [00:11:20]:
There you go. Perfect.

Ken McDonald [00:11:22]:
How's that?

Jonathan Bennett [00:11:22]:
It's great. Don't move it. Yeah. All right. Ken's going to talk Canonical. What are those crazy guys up to?

Ken McDonald [00:11:31]:
Ah, would you believe funding research?

Jonathan Bennett [00:11:35]:
Yes, I would.

Ken McDonald [00:11:36]:
Because this week Bobby Barsalf and Sourav Rudra wrote about Canonical funding research into automated C-to-Rust translation. This funding will support a 3-year research project to make it practical to automatically move large mature software projects from seed to rush. The project is a partnership between Canonical, the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom— you might want to visit there while you're up over in the UK, John— Jonathan— and of course the UK Research and Innovation. Now it's aiming to build an all-encompassing, encompassing platform that can take a C repository running into hundreds of thousands of lines and translate it into Rust that's safe, behavioral— behavioral— behavior— behave yourself, correct— and maintainable Rust program. Now, according to Surov, getting C to Rust automatically means solving a few separate problems. And the system tackles them in sequence. First, it has to break a massive code base into pieces small enough to work with without losing track of how those pieces depend on each other elsewhere in the code. Sounds like putting a puzzle together— breaking a puzzle apart and then putting it back together, doesn't it?

Jonathan Bennett [00:13:13]:
Mm-hmm.

Ken McDonald [00:13:14]:
Then the actual translation happens. Handled by language models trained on real C-to-Rust conversions with the goal of writing code that looks like something a Rust developer chose to write rather than C dressed up in Rust syntax. Ah, sounds like a cross-dressing there. Next is the harder task of proving the translated code actually behaves like the original. Now, this will be done with fuzzing and formal equivalence checks. According to Bobby, the new project will use a hybrid or neurosymbolic approach. This combines machine learning with traditional program analysis, testing, and formal methods. Canonical plans to use AppArmor and SnapConfine as real-world case studies.

Ken McDonald [00:14:10]:
while making it very clear that AppArmor and snapconfine are not being rewritten in Rust right now. These projects are only being used as case studies to test the technology, and there is no plan to replace their current versions with the research results. Now I'm going to recommend reading Bobby and Serves' article to understand why you should care and how this fits into Canonical's broader adoption of Rust.

Jonathan Bennett [00:14:40]:
Yeah, it's interesting to see that they're using the— again, they're using the AI for this project and so many things are moving in that direction. I'm seeing people on Twitter in various places that are like, I was a hardcore AI skeptic, but my graybeard friends told me I was being dumb and needed to try again. So at least one notable troll on Twitter could take that approach. And then like his next tweet was, I've automated all the things. It's amazing.

Ken McDonald [00:15:11]:
I want to recommend that everybody start lowercasing AI so you can tell the difference between AI and Al.

Jonathan Bennett [00:15:19]:
Poor Al Williams over at Hackaday. He gets flack all the time.

Jeff Massie [00:15:25]:
Written by Al.

Jonathan Bennett [00:15:26]:
Wait, no, the other one.

Jeff Massie [00:15:29]:
Or just use a different font.

Jonathan Bennett [00:15:30]:
I guess.

Jeff Massie [00:15:31]:
Where the capital I has bars at the top and bottom.

Ken McDonald [00:15:34]:
Top and bottom. Yep. Like it's supposed to have.

Jeff Massie [00:15:37]:
It actually is a right angle bracket.

Jonathan Bennett [00:15:39]:
Like it's supposed to. These darn kids with their darn typescripts. Get off my lawn. Weird fonts.

Jeff Massie [00:15:46]:
Courier never let me down.

Jonathan Bennett [00:15:50]:
Indeed.

Ken McDonald [00:15:52]:
So do you think we'll start seeing more Rust coming out because of this?

Jonathan Bennett [00:15:57]:
I don't know. It's definitely going to be a useful tool for a certain group of people, but there's a lot of— when they talk about formal equivalence checks, there's a lot of things that are just gonna be challenging to, you know, so like, it's the, what, the 80/20 rule? Like, you can get 80% of the work done, but it's the 20% that takes most of the time. I feel like that's gonna be the case in trying to to move to Rust and get away from C and all of those things.

Ken McDonald [00:16:26]:
Because I mean, Rust— And you're never going to get rid of the last 5%. Right.

Jonathan Bennett [00:16:29]:
Well, I mean, Rust and C are very different languages and it's just, they work differently. And there's just cases where I've come to believe that it's basically always a mistake to deeply integrate the language in the package manager. Like the way Cargo works, I just cannot stand it. And from a security viewpoint, it's, uh, kind of got terrible problems built into it because you're—

Ken McDonald [00:16:56]:
Worse than, uh, Python?

Jonathan Bennett [00:16:59]:
No, it's the same problem as Python, and it's the same problem as like Node has, uh, JavaScript doing Node.js with npm. It's when you're— when you download packages to be able to compile, and this was actually— well, Node has the problem of downloading packages at runtime, It's just not as reliable as the old C approach. If you have either the libraries are baked in or they're grabbed through your systems, like your build system or through your system libraries. So, maybe that's just me being the old man and yelling at the kids on my lawn, but I don't like Cargo at all. Well, I was gonna say, just go ahead and step in.

Jeff Massie [00:17:44]:
back slightly. There's still assembly in the Linux kernel. I mean, there's certain things that you're just not going to be able— there's those corner cases, special things that you can't just say, oh, we're going to 100% Rust. Or in almost, you know, well, most highly complex projects, you're going to have some weird little things that just—

Ken McDonald [00:18:11]:
Well, I'll throw one in for you. Every computer needs machine language.

Jonathan Bennett [00:18:22]:
Well, yeah, but you can get—

Jeff Massie [00:18:23]:
That's what they run on.

Jonathan Bennett [00:18:25]:
You can get any language to compile down to machine language. Ken dropping the real truthy truth bombs on us there. All right, let's take a quick break actually, and then we'll get back to some Not at all controversial news. Ready for this? So we teased that, and, uh, this one is, uh, this one is interesting. It's, it's about Omarchi, which means it's also about DHH, uh, the, you know, the, the guy, the guy behind Ruby, the guy behind Basecamp. Uh, you may love him, you may hate him. There's, you know, the internet has opinions on people and him in particular. Uh, but Omarchi is an interesting distro.

Jonathan Bennett [00:19:07]:
And they've had enough success that they have decided, DHH and some other people in the tech world, some tech bros, have decided to put their money where their mouths are. And they have created the Omacom Foundation. And it is intended to be the sort of the controlling interest, the group, the nonprofit that holds the trademarks, does infrastructure funding, basically support the open source projects and developers of Omarchi. Linux distro. And they have 8 founding patrons. And it's Toby Lütke from Shopify and Patrick Collison of Stripe, Michael Dell of Dell Technologies, Jack Dorsey of Block and other things, Matthew Prince from Cloudflare, Brendan Eribe of Sesame and Oculus, Jason Fried of 37signals, and DHH himself. And they've each put up $1 million. So Omicron Foundation starts its life with a cool $8 million in its bank account.

Jonathan Bennett [00:20:12]:
And they are actually— the DHH poster even says, this is a ridiculous sum of money. I intend to make sure it lasts a long time. And their intent is to make the year of the Linux desktop come true. And they're already doing some interesting things with that, like funding. I think I've seen that they're probably going to fund Arch. It looks like they're going to fund—

Jeff Massie [00:20:32]:
Fedora.

Jonathan Bennett [00:20:34]:
Oh, what's the desktop manager that they use? Hyperland. They're going to fund Hyperland. I wouldn't— would not surprise me to see that they were to fund some things like Ladybird and a few others. Really, really interesting to see. And like, I get it that this group of people are obnoxious. Some people find them obnoxious. Let's put it that way. And have various problems with them.

Jonathan Bennett [00:20:54]:
But at the same time, like, they are working to make Linux better and they're working to fund some of these places and That's good. We like that. So, yeah, not controversial at all. I don't know what you're talking about. No problems. We won't get heat on Twitter about this.

Ken McDonald [00:21:08]:
Nothing controversial about them being an exclusive Hyperland sponsor.

Jonathan Bennett [00:21:15]:
Indeed. But I will say, like, putting the joking aside, like, it is cool to see yet another— it's a Linux distro that's become somewhat popular and they're trying to do it the right way and have a foundation behind it. They're trying to make sure that it's funded. So I mean, that's genuinely a good thing.

Jeff Massie [00:21:31]:
Yeah, it's probably got a little more staying power than some of them that kind of show up for a release or 2 and then poof. Yeah, I had to look it up because I'm like, what's the whole kind of foundation behind it? It is based on Arch, origin in Denmark. Like you said, the Hyperland desktop. And they're trying to just make a really smooth, easy distribution to use. From what I'm just looking on DistroWatch, so, you know, take that with a grain of salt, but.

Ken McDonald [00:22:07]:
You might also want to check out omarchiplugins.com.

Jonathan Bennett [00:22:12]:
Oh, they have a whole plugin thing, huh? Yeah, that's cool. I don't know. I haven't run Omarchi on anything. Maybe, Maybe I'll try to throw it on a machine or put it in a virtual machine and just take a look at it and see what it's all about. Because it's— because kind of like one of the ideas behind Omarchi is to give you a kickstarted Hyperland install. Because Hyperland can take a long time to set up and really get tuned the way that you want it. And I kind of get the idea that Omarchi is just like, it's DHH's personal Hyperland setup. He's like, I don't want to set this up every time.

Jonathan Bennett [00:22:48]:
Let me just make a distro around it.

Jeff Massie [00:22:52]:
You know, and I've only used a few, you know, tiling managers a few times. It's just kind of not for me.

Jonathan Bennett [00:23:01]:
Sure.

Jeff Massie [00:23:02]:
But, you know, my KDE right now, which I do love KDE, I'm using the default themes. I turned them on to dark mode. That's about it, you know?

Jonathan Bennett [00:23:13]:
Yeah. But you do tiling though, don't you? Because you've got the ultrawide 3-monitor. And so you tile it to make it act like it's 3 monitors?

Jeff Massie [00:23:21]:
Kind of manually. For work, I do. I have predefined positions so I can hit the Shift key, drag a window in an area, and it snaps to that tiling space. But like right now, I kind of have my show notes on the left or the show, document on the left. I have everybody else in the middle, plus my show notes in the middle. And on the right, I have the Discord where I can see some of the chat and things like that that are going through, or I can reply to chat. But most of the time, I'm not running enough windows that it really matters, you know.

Jonathan Bennett [00:24:04]:
Yeah, indeed. Um, I think it'd be interesting to watch what happens with this. And like I said, I think it'll be fun. I'll give it a try sometime, maybe. Maybe when the new, I guess it depends upon the timing here, but when the new Framework 13 Pro comes in, I may throw Omarchi on that just to start with. Oh, there you go.

Ken McDonald [00:24:22]:
I probably don't want to travel with Omarchi.

Jonathan Bennett [00:24:24]:
So that's the thing. I'm just thinking about that. Like if it comes in a few, just a few days before I have to go, go back to Europe, I probably don't want to travel with something I don't know. I'm going to want Fedora on it for that. But outside of that, yeah, I would, I would love to play around, just use that as my, my, my played laptop until I really, really—

Ken McDonald [00:24:41]:
Unless you dual boot.

Jonathan Bennett [00:24:42]:
I don't want to mess with that. I've done that before. I've done the dual boot and the tri-boot thing before. I'm too old and too busy to fight with that. Let my son here in a few years, he'll be the one dual booting and tri-booting everything. He'll be like, Dad, look at this.

Jeff Massie [00:24:59]:
This is so cool.

Jonathan Bennett [00:24:59]:
Like, yeah, I used to do that. I used to be cool.

Ken McDonald [00:25:03]:
Look, I've got all 3 running at the same time.

Jonathan Bennett [00:25:06]:
Done that too.

Jeff Massie [00:25:06]:
You know, I used to do a bunch of that too. I've kind of, I'm running different desktops. I'm trying this. I'm trying that. I'm custom building kernels. I'm kind of, you know, and it kind of, after a while, it's like, uh, you know, I, I'm fine with how this is. Turn it to dark mode and that's all I need.

Ken McDonald [00:25:23]:
Yep.

Jonathan Bennett [00:25:23]:
Yep.

Ken McDonald [00:25:23]:
This is true.

Jonathan Bennett [00:25:25]:
All right.

Jeff Massie [00:25:26]:
I do have a custom wallpaper. So that's, that's my customization of the—

Jonathan Bennett [00:25:31]:
Really ricing the desktop there, Jeff.

Jeff Massie [00:25:33]:
Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [00:25:33]:
Custom wallpaper and everything.

Jeff Massie [00:25:36]:
Pretty bland rice, you know?

Jonathan Bennett [00:25:39]:
Indeed. All right. Well, we want to talk about NVIDIA and GeForce, GeForce Now.

Jeff Massie [00:25:45]:
What's going on there?

Ken McDonald [00:25:46]:
Oh yeah.

Jeff Massie [00:25:46]:
We're going gaming.

Ken McDonald [00:25:49]:
Gaming.

Jonathan Bennett [00:25:49]:
Get in, losers. We're going gaming.

Jeff Massie [00:25:53]:
And this one might be a good one for Ken. So NVIDIA has moved its native GeForce Now client for Linux out of beta and into a full stable release. So the app's been in beta, you know, sitting in beta for months. And, you know, first of all, you might be going, uh, but Jeff, what is GeForce Now? For those who don't know, it's a cloud gaming service. And instead of running games on your own computer, NVIDIA runs them on powerful, powerful remote servers. The server streams the game video back to your screen, and your computer sends the button presses back to the server. So basically it turns your maybe not very powerful machine into a display device, basically. Now, it is rather polarizing service because some love it, you know, based on the hardware, the games they can play and all that.

Jeff Massie [00:26:48]:
And others hate it. Just, it kind of depends on how you feel about NVIDIA and the pricing models they have. You know, the more money, the higher resolutions and eye candy you can have. And it's a subscription service. So that's another thing that especially now has become more of a hot topic. But that all being said, as of now, we officially have it for Linux. The big addition here is Flatpak packaging. So NVIDIA now hosts its own dedicated Flatpak repository separate from Flathub.

Jeff Massie [00:27:24]:
So instead of pulling the app from Flathub store, you need to add NVIDIA's own repository and install it from there. Now, there's only 2 commands needed, so it isn't like a real hard process. And because it's Flatpak-based rather than tied to a specific package format, you know, that helps with wherever you want to load it. The app is sandboxed, self-updating. Portable across distributions that support Flatpak, which I would be surprised if there's any major ones that don't. And that way it's not just running on the one NVIDIA officially certifies. Now, just for the record, the official certification is Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and newer. Though, like I said, if you can run a Flatpak, you should be able to run this.

Jeff Massie [00:28:16]:
It just— you might be a little bit more on your own versus having official support. On the hardware side, requirements are not bad. You know, remember the actual game's running on NVIDIA servers, not your local machine. So you, you need a dual-core x86 64-bit CPU at 2 GHz or faster, 4 GB of RAM, and a GPU capable, capable of H.264 or H.265 decoding with Vulkan. Um, at least on the NVIDIA side, I believe it was the 1000 series graphics cards are capable of doing this. So if you have a 1000 series, that's enough to run this. Uh, performance-wise, the ultimate tier subscribers can stream up to 5K resolution at 120 frames per second, or you can push as high as 360 frames per second at 1080p For, you know, your competitive low latency games.

Jonathan Bennett [00:29:16]:
Though, you know, it—

Jeff Massie [00:29:18]:
okay, low latency. I mean, it's never going to be what it is on your local machines. So I mean, it— when you say low latency, it comes with some asterisks or quotes when you, you know, air quotes when you say that. To fight the lag, Nvidia has also It has tuned its DLSS frame generation pipeline on the server side, refining frame interpolation and response handling specifically to cut down on input lag during these, you know, your high refresh rate sessions. But you still have your network connection in there and you have that lag from the server to your screen. You know, you got that round trip. You send a keystroke, goes to the server. it runs it and then it sends it back.

Jeff Massie [00:30:05]:
So that's why I'm like, low latency, asterisk, you know, see footnote, you know, air quotes, all that. The update also cleans up a handful of issues that were in the beta release, such as account connection failed, you know, errors when the client tried to sync to a user's Steam or other digital storefront libraries. Uh, non-English keyboard layouts were also causing input mapping problems during active streaming sessions, which now has been fixed. So localized keybinds pass through correctly. NVIDIA additionally cleaned up the video scaling and aspect ratio detection, which has been producing some black bars or incorrect scaling on certain display setups, including multi-monitor and high refresh rate configurations. Take a look at the article linked in the show notes. And in it, you'll see links that give you more details on the changes, how you can actually get it. And, you know, like I said, it's not for everybody, but no matter how you like to play, happy gaming.

Jonathan Bennett [00:31:11]:
Yeah, absolutely. I've got a buddy that really liked the GeForce Now thing, the streaming. And I just always found it a little... So something about it was a little off-putting, that idea of we're streaming games to a server and back rather than playing them locally.

Jeff Massie [00:31:27]:
And that's why I said it's very polarizing.

Jonathan Bennett [00:31:30]:
Yes.

Jeff Massie [00:31:30]:
Most people aren't like, well, I don't know. It's probably, if you know about it, most people are either, I love it and it's great for making my old hardware, you know, awesome. Or people despise the whole, I'm paying a subscription. I hate subscriptions. I don't feel like I own the game. I, you know, All that. So, but it's an option out there. And I think the more options we have, the better.

Jonathan Bennett [00:31:59]:
I suppose that's true. What you got there, Ken?

Jeff Massie [00:32:04]:
It's like a Rubik's Cube.

Jonathan Bennett [00:32:06]:
Looks like a psychedelic Rubik's Cube. Something about your lighting setup does not like that. Like it was, I think it was subtracting all the green out of it. I think that's what's going on there. Well, would you use that? You can see through it.

Jeff Massie [00:32:18]:
Would you use the GeForce Now, Ken? Because I know you've got some older hardware that—

Ken McDonald [00:32:24]:
Well, that's what I was looking at. The hardware requirements, it says that you need to be running Ubuntu 24.04 LTS or later.

Jeff Massie [00:32:35]:
That's the official. If you can run a Flatpak, you're probably going to be okay. It's just, it's certain clients.

Ken McDonald [00:32:44]:
That when selecting a windowing system, use X.Org for NVIDIA GPUs and Wayland for AMD or Intel GPUs.

Jeff Massie [00:32:55]:
Yep.

Jonathan Bennett [00:32:56]:
Makes sense.

Jeff Massie [00:32:58]:
And then it says— I was going to double-check that one, but I didn't have time to double-check to see if that's really the case still.

Ken McDonald [00:33:06]:
On the hardware requirements, dual-core, x86 or x64 CPU at 2 GHz or faster. My old, uh, Lenovo ThinkCentre is a 2.8 GHz AMD Athlon 2.

Jonathan Bennett [00:33:23]:
There you go.

Ken McDonald [00:33:24]:
I think it would support it.

Jonathan Bennett [00:33:25]:
It might work. I, I bet what it really comes down to is if your, your GPU supports the accelerated decoding of, you know, H.264, H.265, whatever it is that they use to actually do the streaming. That's probably the most important thing.

Ken McDonald [00:33:40]:
Think an AMD ATI Radeon 3000 would support it?

Jonathan Bennett [00:33:45]:
I don't know, because I don't know what exactly they use to do that streaming. They may have some way to make that work.

Jeff Massie [00:33:53]:
Yeah, 264 or 265 works. But it decodes through Vulkan. So it's got to be able to Vulkan decode.

Ken McDonald [00:34:02]:
Or have a Mesa driver version 24.2.8 or later.

Jonathan Bennett [00:34:09]:
Okay. Yeah, your mileage may vary then, but I, you know, what'd be fun is to see like the really old potato machines that people get it running on. If somebody has a really weird or really old machine and you make it work, let us know about it. That would be fun to see.

Jeff Massie [00:34:23]:
Well, you know, and realistically, if you're playing something, uh, well, imagine something like Baldur's Gate or one of those kind of turn-based combat or something like that where you can Oh, I have half a second of lag. Well, it might be a little annoying, but it's still playable.

Ken McDonald [00:34:38]:
Sid Meier's Civilization III?

Jonathan Bennett [00:34:42]:
Well, I think Jeff's point is you can play the newest Civilization with those super nice graphics. And if it's lagging on decoding, it doesn't matter because you still get to see the really nice graphics.

Jeff Massie [00:34:53]:
Yeah, your latency is not really a big— it's not a fast Twitch game. You're not playing a Quake or a Doom or something like that where you've got to be fast. The game engine's just sitting there waiting for your input and like, oh, what's your next move going to be? You know?

Jonathan Bennett [00:35:09]:
Yep, absolutely.

Ken McDonald [00:35:11]:
All right. Mario Super Paint.

Jonathan Bennett [00:35:14]:
Not quite. Let's talk about imagery though and the new PSD support inside GIMP 3.4. Ken, what's new there?

Ken McDonald [00:35:23]:
You're stealing all my stuff that I'm going to tell you.

Jonathan Bennett [00:35:29]:
Talk about turnabout is fair play, my friend.

Ken McDonald [00:35:33]:
Yes, it is. But let me go ahead and thank Bobby Barsalf and Marcus Nestor for doing all the research that I used for putting this little bit of information together about some new features and improvements coming to at least my favorite open source, free, and cross-platform imaging editing software. Yes, we're talking about GIMP version 3.4, or the official title, GNU Image Manipulation Program. GIMP's quicker to say. Now, according to Marcus, the biggest change in GIMP 3.4 is a new default project file format that, uh, Jonathan had mentioned that follows a more common zipped XML structure, supports multi-page and animation features, and enables faster saving by updating only parts of the file instead of the whole project every time. Now, the binary XEF format will still be supported because I know some of us have, uh, really old XEF, uh, projects that we've worked on and we want to continue using. Now, according to Bobby, XCF has been GIMP's primary project format since 1997. With this new design, it will also lay the groundwork for something that we have long wanted.

Ken McDonald [00:37:04]:
I know I have— autosaving. Now, non-destructive editing is also receiving significant attention. Filters can now be applied non-destructively to layer masks. And the filter popover has been redesigned so you can manage effects on both the layer and its mask from the same interface. GIMP 3.4 also promises spectral blending support for the MyPaint brush tool to simulate the effects of blending physical pigments in digital art, plus support for using the gradient tool non-destructively. Support for the Photoshop file format, sometimes referred to as PSD, saw some great improvements in the upcoming GIMP 3.4 release, which promises PSD metadata exporting to— for TIFFs and JPEGs, PSD descriptor import support, editable text layers, Support for importing solid color shapes as vector layers, and support for adjustment layers and modern layer styles to be shown as their General Graphics Library, or sometimes referred to as GEGL. In other words, their equivalents. Now, I've only touched on some of the many improvements that Bobby and Marcus covered in this— their articles.

Ken McDonald [00:38:37]:
So if you want all the details, just follow the links in our show notes. Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [00:38:45]:
So neat to see things continue to come along. You remember when I think it was GIMP 3 was like considered almost to be vaporware? Like, oh, it'll never come out. We've been waiting for GIMP 3 for years and years.

Jeff Massie [00:38:57]:
I was thinking the same thing.

Ken McDonald [00:38:58]:
We're about to see GIMP 3.4.

Jonathan Bennett [00:39:00]:
Yeah.

Jeff Massie [00:39:01]:
Well, they had so much to redo from 2 that I think They kind of said they kind of programmed themselves into a corner a little bit. So making, jumping to 3 was a major rewrite. Well, or that's the way I understood it anyway.

Ken McDonald [00:39:15]:
They had to retool to go from GTK2 to GTK3. Wait till they start retooling for GTK4.

Jeff Massie [00:39:25]:
Well, my understanding, it was kind of a lot like KDE. So when KDE jumped from 3 to 4, there was a whole lot of work to kind of isolate itself from, or making it a little more modular and easy for, like in KDE's case, the Qt changes. My understanding is GIMP is the same way with GTK. So when the next revision comes out, you know, the next whole number, it's not near as bad to jump to it. They've kind of— Made the changes so they don't get stuck like they were.

Ken McDonald [00:40:01]:
If that makes sense. Nothing breaks.

Jeff Massie [00:40:03]:
Yeah. So the changes can be done a lot easier and quicker without breaking everything else. That's the way I understood it.

Ken McDonald [00:40:11]:
So it won't take another 10 years.

Jeff Massie [00:40:15]:
Right.

Jonathan Bennett [00:40:17]:
Until there's another massive library change that they have to reprogram everything for.

Jeff Massie [00:40:23]:
Well, supposedly it's supposed to be easier now. They went and said, we learned our lesson on this one. So we're taking these steps to make these library changes easier.

Ken McDonald [00:40:34]:
Famous last words?

Jonathan Bennett [00:40:36]:
I was kind of thinking that myself, but yeah.

Jeff Massie [00:40:38]:
I thought it was hold my beer.

Jonathan Bennett [00:40:41]:
That too. There's a lot of famous last words, actually. What could possibly go wrong?

Jeff Massie [00:40:46]:
What could there be in this?

Jonathan Bennett [00:40:47]:
Yeah, yeah. All right. So what is, what's next? Let's see. We're going to take a quick break. That's what next is. And then we're going to talk about some KDE. So we'll be right back after this. So it is almost time for us to all go and roll out KDE 6.8.

Jonathan Bennett [00:41:05]:
Well, sort of close. We are, we're taking a look at the This Week in KDE and they are working towards ideally in about a week, a soft freeze. And then early in September, the 10th of September, they're looking at a beta 1. And then hopefully we'll see Plasma 6.8.0 release on the 14th of October. And if we go and take a look at This Week in Plasma, a few things that they're looking at. One of the ones that sort of surprised everybody, us Americans at least, us English speakers, that we didn't know that this wasn't supported, is when you use a system in a language other than English, you couldn't use the search box. Well, you could. It's, it's really, it boils down to can you search in one language and find it in another? And, uh, it's like, that's, that's sort of a— it's on one hand, that's sort of a strange feature, but on the other hand, so much of the world does business in English.

Jonathan Bennett [00:42:06]:
Like, it makes sense that you're going to want to be able to search for mouse, for instance, and get the mouse page even if you're running your system in French or in Spanish or whatever. So that's sort of a nice— oh, what's the term they use? Quality of living. It's a nice quality of living change, particularly for those using other languages on their systems. There is more work being done in the login, the lock screen in particular, and the ability to switch which authentication type you want to use and a nicer UI around that. Which really the screenshot they've got here looks quite nice switching to which thing that you want to use. Apparently you can also use smart cards to log into KDE. I didn't know that. Unfortunately, I don't have a device with a smart card reader.

Jonathan Bennett [00:43:02]:
I may eventually need to get one of those. You can now no longer set your resolution to ridiculously low values. The alignment of buttons on the lock screen is better. Oh, A lot of little things like this have been fixed and getting better. Automatic brightness now adjusts in a more intelligent way. And the audio volume widget is placed in a panel in its standalone form. So the popup starts out large enough to accommodate everything without scrolling, which is really nice because trying to scroll, I don't know if you've ever had this problem, but trying to scroll on a UI where the scroll button changes things on the UI, be a little challenging, and I've run into that too. Error messages are getting better.

Jonathan Bennett [00:43:52]:
Um, the highlighting non-default settings is getting better, particularly in the Roam desktop page. Um, cursor feedback effects now dodge screen edges so that they're now always fully visible. That's handy. Um, looks like the— yeah, the, the extra— there's— they've got a little video of it here. So like if, if you have an extra something going along with your cursor that You know, it's either like in this case, it was a bouncing icon showing that something was starting. It will now move so that you can see that even if your cursors ran all the way over to the edge. There's bugs fixed in 6.7, some crashes fixed, multiple issues in system settings. Apparently the digital clock widget would do a text overflow and didn't look great.

Jonathan Bennett [00:44:38]:
All kinds of fun stuff that they've got in here. A bunch of interesting bug fixes and things coming for 6.8. Definitely something to look forward to.

Ken McDonald [00:44:46]:
Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [00:44:49]:
What do you guys think?

Jeff Massie [00:44:51]:
Oh, I'm looking forward to it. Isn't it—

Ken McDonald [00:44:53]:
Trying to think how long it'll be before I see it.

Jonathan Bennett [00:44:56]:
Yeah, I think I mentioned that at the beginning. October 14th is when they expect 6.8 to fully release.

Ken McDonald [00:45:06]:
And Ubuntu 26.04 is going to upgrade to it?

Jonathan Bennett [00:45:11]:
I don't know. I don't know if Ubuntu will or not.

Jeff Massie [00:45:15]:
I wouldn't be surprised if they did because it will be 26.10 and they're, you know, .10 releases just throw caution to the wind. Let's just give it a shot.

Ken McDonald [00:45:28]:
Oh yeah, the .10. But I think for my podcast system, I'm going to keep it on 26.04 for a while.

Jonathan Bennett [00:45:35]:
It's an LTS, right?

Ken McDonald [00:45:37]:
Yep.

Jonathan Bennett [00:45:37]:
They may leave it on the— They may leave it on the previous KDE. They may leave it on 6.7.

Ken McDonald [00:45:42]:
Which is 6.6.6 or 6.7? I can't remember.

Jonathan Bennett [00:45:49]:
Looks like they're working on 6.6.7. I remember we had quite some fun talking about when 6.6.6 came out. A very notable release number there.

Jeff Massie [00:46:05]:
Yeah, right now I'm on 6.7.4.

Jonathan Bennett [00:46:09]:
I'm not sure what I'm on. I'm trying to update some machines. They all got way behind on updated. I haven't rebooted in forever on the desktop behind me in particular.

Jeff Massie [00:46:22]:
Yeah. I think, Ken, you should just— 6.10 comes out, you ought to go to KDE 6.8 and then podcast on it. Just throw caution to the wind, pedal to the metal.

Ken McDonald [00:46:32]:
I'll do that on the other partition. That way I've got a backup plan.

Jonathan Bennett [00:46:38]:
Ken's still cool enough to dual boot.

Jeff Massie [00:46:42]:
Ken's, uh, yeah, Ken's got his belt and suspenders. He's like, okay, I will not wear the suspenders, but I'm going to have them right here just in case.

Jonathan Bennett [00:46:54]:
Yep. Yep. Hot swap between the two. Yeah. All right.

Jeff Massie [00:46:58]:
Swapping suspenders.

Ken McDonald [00:47:00]:
Yeah. It's always good to have a backup plan.

Jonathan Bennett [00:47:02]:
Yep. All right, Jeff. Well, something about all of our desktops and all of our laptops, they got fans in them. And I don't think this story is about laptop fans, but it might be about desktop fans. What you got? What's your cheap little gizmo?

Jeff Massie [00:47:17]:
Well, you know, something that we have not had in a bit is Jeff's Hardware Corner. That changes today.

Jonathan Bennett [00:47:24]:
Changes now.

Jeff Massie [00:47:26]:
It changes now, which is also today, which no matter when you listen to it, it's always today. But anyway, I have a bit of hardware that some of you might be interested in. Well, memory and storage is up in price, and we won't even talk about GPUs, but you want to upgrade your, your system, you know, cases and fans and things like that are areas where As an enthusiast, you can still play and upgrade for a reasonable price while you're keeping the same, you know, CPU, GPU, memory, drives, all that. The other stuff, it's probably a good time to upgrade now. Arctic Cooling just did something almost no PC enthusiast hardware vendor bothers to do. They wrote their own Linux kernel driver for a product And they got it merged into the mainline kernel before the hardware even shipped. The product is the new Arctic fan controller. It's a 10-port USB fan controller that costs $9.

Jeff Massie [00:48:33]:
So the story actually starts back in March when an Arctic cooler engineer named Aro Serrero posted, posted a hardware monitoring driver. It doesn't matter what physical product the driver was for since Arctic didn't have a fan controller with a USB interface at the time, so nothing in their lineup could be used with this. The driver itself is small, it's only around 300 lines of C code, and it uses the standard Linux hardwaremon, HWMON, interface to report fan speeds and set PWM duty cycles across all 10 channels. The driver kept getting refined over the following months and eventually landed in the 7.2 kernel. Then at the end of July, Arctic finally announced the actual product on social media, calling it open source and Linux ready right in the launch announcement. When have we had a Linux bragging in a launch announcement? You know, for something like a fan controller. Yeah, some of the big hardware, you know, server stuff, but fan controller? Color me impressed. Michael Larible says that in 22 years of covering Linux hardware, he's never seen mainstream PC cooling or peripheral brand do this.

Jeff Massie [00:49:58]:
You know, companies like Thermaltake, Corsair, NZXT have never contributed kernel drivers directly. It's usually left to community developers to reverse engineer USB protocols after the fact, if it happens at all. On the hardware side, the controller connects to the system over USB for monitoring and control. Power comes from a separate SATA connector, so it doesn't rely on the motherboard fan headers, and all 10 channels use individual PWM regulation. So Arctic does ship Windows software for it, but on Linux, the mainline hardwaremon driver is what does the job. And Michael Arable confirmed that it works on out of the box on Ubuntu with a 7.2 kernel. Once the kernel config_sensors_arctic_fan_controller option was enabled, because it plugs into the standard hardwaremon, SysFS nodes. It immediately is compatible with existing Linux fan controls tools like Cooler Control and Hardware-Monitor.

Jeff Massie [00:51:09]:
You know, no special software is required. What you can already get open source, it works with it. At roughly $9, Larible calls it the first sub-$10 product he's found worth reviewing. And with 10 fan channels and day one mainline Linux support, he says, There's currently no better option for Linux users who want proper desktop or server fan control. Take a look at the article in the show notes for more details and links to where you can purchase this awesome controller. And yes, you do need the 7.2 kernel. So if you're running an old LTS, you might need to upgrade or wedge the newer kernel into your system or backport the code. Either way, this hot summer, Keep your cool.

Jonathan Bennett [00:51:56]:
Well done. Yeah, it's, you know, I actually have a potential use for this now that I think about it. I've got a couple of cabinets that I've built that are bookshelves. And then behind the bookshelves, there's a column for airflow. And I do a couple of rack-mounted computers. One's my home server and the other is my main desktop. And I've got a line of fans that blows air sort of up that chimney. And at the moment, they're just plugged into essentially a power supply.

Jonathan Bennett [00:52:28]:
I could totally use something like this fan controller to control those.

Jeff Massie [00:52:33]:
Interesting. I'm trying to think of things to use it for just so I can support them and buy one.

Ken McDonald [00:52:39]:
Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [00:52:40]:
I've got a couple of places where I might be able to use this. Have I ever shown you guys pictures of that? Have I posted pictures in the Discord of my, my crazy rack mount setup? If not, I'll have to remember and do that.

Ken McDonald [00:52:52]:
If you have, it's been so long that we probably need to repost them again so people wouldn't have to search back to day one.

Jonathan Bennett [00:53:00]:
Yeah, I'll see if I can get some pictures. The problem is that after traveling so much, my office is a wreck and I don't know that I can get to the cabinet where the server is, for instance. You think I'm joking? I'm not joking.

Jeff Massie [00:53:13]:
In all fairness, before you were traveling, wasn't your office kind of always a mess?

Jonathan Bennett [00:53:20]:
Jeff's so mean to me.

Jeff Massie [00:53:23]:
Well, I can't always pick on Ken.

Jonathan Bennett [00:53:25]:
True.

Ken McDonald [00:53:28]:
Yep. I thought I was your target.

Jeff Massie [00:53:34]:
Well, don't worry, Ken. We'll pick on you. We got to mix it up.

Jonathan Bennett [00:53:38]:
We share love around here.

Jeff Massie [00:53:40]:
Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [00:53:40]:
All right. Well, we're going to take a quick break and then we're going to come back and talk about Network Manager and what's new there. And then we're finally going to end up with that 7.3 news and some weird kernel stuff. Like this is why they're removing things from the kernel. So don't go anywhere. We'll be right back.

Ken McDonald [00:53:59]:
All right. Now that we're back, I agree. We should start talking about network management. And this week, Bobby Barzov and Markus Nester wrote about the latest maintenance update to the default open source networking stack for almost every major desktop-oriented distribution and many server platforms. We're talking, of course, about Network Manager this time, version 1. .58.1. According to Bobby, one notable change concerns WPA3 networks. The new release fixes automatic connection to SAE-based WPA3 networks using profiles configured with the key-mgmt or key management equals wpa-psk.

Ken McDonald [00:54:53]:
Addressing cases where Network Manager failed to reconnect automatically. Network Manager 1.58.1 also supports the 6 GHz value for the band property on Wi-Fi connections and ensures IPv4 forwarding is properly enabled in mobile broadband data interfaces. According to Marcus, Network Manager 1.58.1 improves support for private connections, the ones that specify a user in the connection.permissions property to use ca-cert or system-ca-cert rather than using the 802.1x ca-path. And phase2-ca-path properties, which are no longer accepted. It also sets the parent interface by name for NBFT VLAN connections in the initrd generator to avoid race conditions before boot— or excuse me, during boot. Forwards the DNS server port number to systemd-resolved. for DNS URIs, improves the normalization of Bluetooth NAP connections, and fixes multiple crashes discovered in the Network Manager 1.58 release. Now, since I have only skimmed over items mentioned in Bobby and Marcus's articles, I'm going to recommend reading them for more in-depth information.

Ken McDonald [00:56:38]:
If you're so inclined.

Jonathan Bennett [00:56:42]:
I had a moment while I was out of town that where the Linux network manager and particularly the KDE network interface, the UI side really impressed me because it made something very, very easy. I had a Raspberry Pi connected to a big Hub75 screen, which is like an individual pixel screen. They get used a lot for like dev, displays, display screens, stuff like that. And this Raspberry Pi, like I'm trying to trim down the things that I travel with because I usually, you know, I have, I'm kind of paranoid and it's like, oh, I might need this, throw it in. I might need this, throw it in. And I end up with, you know, bags stuffed full of stuff.

Ken McDonald [00:57:21]:
And no clothes.

Jonathan Bennett [00:57:22]:
Well, no, I usually have clothes too to spare.

Ken McDonald [00:57:26]:
At least one change.

Jonathan Bennett [00:57:27]:
Although when I went to Vegas for DEF CON, I did indeed start running out of clothes because I was sweating through multiple outfits in a day. But anyway, you guys didn't want to know that. That's TMI. So anyway, this previous travel, the last one I went to, I'm like, I'm not going to bring the portable monitor. I'm not going to bring the keyboard. I don't need those things. And then I needed to work on something on the Raspberry Pi, and I didn't have a monitor to plug it into, and I didn't have a keyboard to control it with. And it's like, oh, what am I going to do to be able to get into this thing? I just needed to make a quick code change and recompile something.

Jonathan Bennett [00:58:01]:
And then the rest of it would work automatically. I had it already set up to where you plug it in, it turns it on, it runs the service, you're good to go. And what I ended up doing was in KDE in particular, when you set up a new connection, you can opt for a new— let's see, what exactly does it call it? A wired Ethernet and then in parentheses shared connection. And I thought, well, that sounds a lot like what I want to do. You know, I, instead of being a DHCP client, I want this machine to be essentially the DHCP host, plug it in directly to the Raspberry Pi, it'll come online, it'll get an IP address, I can SSH into it. It's like, it's kind of a pain to set up, but I know how to do it. I'll do it. But now I saw this, click on it, new, you give it a name and it basically does what you want it to do.

Jonathan Bennett [00:58:50]:
I turned that on, plugged it into the Pi, it came up, DHCP came on, Pi connected to it. And I was able to pretty easily find the IP address that it came up on, SSH right into it, got my work done. It was really nice. Of course, turn the Wi-Fi on so I can get into it without having to do this, all that good stuff. But I was actually really impressed how easy Linux and KDE in particular made that. And yeah, so good. Network managers really come along a lot in the past few years that makes stuff like that really easy.

Jeff Massie [00:59:20]:
So I got a question. How, if you're, so, okay, so you're running a router, say that's got OpenWRT. How does this tie in with that? Is it kind of a second layer of defense or does it enhance what you're like able to do?

Ken McDonald [00:59:36]:
It's actually on your desktop.

Jeff Massie [00:59:38]:
Right. But I'm wondering how, if you're running something like pfSense, OpenWrt, something, a more advanced router-type software, does this enhance that? Or is it like another layer of security? Or does it kind of just redundant?

Jonathan Bennett [00:59:58]:
I mean, there's a decent chance that your router may run Network Manager internally to turn the interfaces on and off. But essentially, Network Manager is like the replacement for the old sysvinit scripts that turn your network cards on. And so Network Manager probably assigns like the easy-to-use names that they, they have. It, uh, it probably turns on, like, probably runs the DHCP client. Um, it detects that something got plugged or unplugged. Uh, Network Manager is also the thing that, that contains like your I think it contains your Wi-Fi passwords and then will start WPA supplicants to make the actual connection over Wi-Fi. It's kind of the brains that orchestrates what your network does inside your machine.

Ken McDonald [01:00:47]:
And also helps to, during boot up, establish your VLAN connections as well.

Jonathan Bennett [01:00:54]:
If you're playing with VLANs, it can help with that. Yeah, all kinds of stuff. Linux networking, there's a lot of fiddly switches and things that you can do between VLANs and virtual connections and internal bridges. Lots of fun stuff.

Jeff Massie [01:01:14]:
And that's why I'm asking, because I'm not a— I know the basics, but it gets deeper.

Ken McDonald [01:01:20]:
Plug the Ethernet cord in here, turn it on.

Jeff Massie [01:01:23]:
Yeah, I know port forwarding and some firewall stuff. The basic stuff like that, but—

Ken McDonald [01:01:30]:
But do you know NVMe boot firmware table for VLAN connections?

Jonathan Bennett [01:01:37]:
That I don't know anything about. I will say that I've had some fun, particularly doing like a server-to-switch connection when the switch supports VLANs and so does the server. You can do fun things like you can do a virtual bridge inside the server and connect the physical port into that. And then you can run VLAN packets over that bridge. And then you connect your individual virtual machines to the same bridge, or you can create virtual network cards and give them VLAN tags and then connect your virtual machine to those. And so, you know, you can layer these things in different ways and you can make really, really complicated, if you want to, network setups, but you can do a lot of fun things. So like, One of the things that you can do, I've done this before, is if you want to have multiple networks, but you only have one NIC on your Linux server, but your switch supports VLANs, then you can just, you can tunnel all those different VLANs down the one network interface and split it out on both sides. So, you know, basically do a fan out in the switch and a fan out in your server.

Jonathan Bennett [01:02:46]:
And then you can also have a, like a virtual router. inside your server and feed that VLAN directly into it. And then in the router interface, you can go in and say, now this VLAN is WAN and this VLAN is LAN and this VLAN goes off to the guest network. Well, you can get, you can get really, really fancy if you want to.

Ken McDonald [01:03:04]:
And then you've got another VLAN just for your VMs to connect via the, to the internet through.

Jonathan Bennett [01:03:12]:
I've done that before as well. And I've also got a VLAN that's specifically for my IoT stuff that I don't necessarily trust. Yeah, I kind of went crazy when we set the network up here at the house and it's pretty complicated, but it works. It's not really giving me trouble since, so something must have been just fine.

Ken McDonald [01:03:30]:
Just confusing.

Jonathan Bennett [01:03:31]:
If you don't know what's going on, it is. I've got notes that help me remember what everything is.

Ken McDonald [01:03:36]:
Just don't lose those notes.

Jonathan Bennett [01:03:38]:
Yeah, well, I mean, they're in a Google Doc and I think also downloaded a place or two, so not doing too bad there. All right, let's talk about Linux 7.3, the one that's coming after the release we just had. And let's talk momentarily about some AI stuff going on in the kernel. So the network changes for 7.3 just got merged. But the headline here is that developers are completely overwhelmed due to AIs and LLMs. And this is actually part of the, I believe it's part of the merge message that went along with this. That's the notes in the merge. And in the recent weeks and months, they have been bombarded with patches, continued craziness, and they're taking a couple of steps in order to keep up with the overload of patches and codes that's being written being written by AI.

Jonathan Bennett [01:04:38]:
Let's just be clear about that. Like, this is, you know, this is the guys out there now using Claude Code, using Gemini, all these different tools to much more quickly write code. And it has changed the balance for a lot of open source projects, including the kernel. And one of the things that they are doing is that they are dropping old drivers. And so we talked earlier in the show about old architectures of CPUs being dropped. And it's the same thing here. They are— there's some of these drivers that it's like there's hardly anybody, maybe nobody using this particular driver. They're going to drop it because it reduces the maintenance burden.

Jonathan Bennett [01:05:22]:
And then the other thing that they're doing is they are doing more triage using AI itself. And this is something that we've seen in the projects I work in too. At DEF CON, I was sitting with some guys and one of the guys was one of our developers and he was describing this process where it's like, you know, somebody new comes in with a patch and obviously it's written by AI. And he goes, so I let my clanker talk to their clanker and they go back and forth until they're both happy about it. And then I put my human eyeballs on the code. And it was just, it was funny to me to hear this, but it's what you got to do because the The amount of pull requests coming in are just, they're getting so crazy. So much code being written so quickly. And so this is happening in the Linux kernel as well.

Jonathan Bennett [01:06:10]:
And so actually reading from the pull request, it says we are, excuse me, the merge request. We are completely overwhelmed, of course. The glimmer of hope is that we secured sufficient LLM budget and access. Thank you, Meta. To run reviews with multiple frontier models on each patch. This eliminates some hallucinations. That said, in terms of reviews, the LLMs can only do so much. And then they said something else I found very interesting.

Jonathan Bennett [01:06:37]:
The sad truth is that our APIs, especially for rare events like PCIe errors, timeouts, et cetera, have always been racy. And by that, they mean there's race conditions in it. There are, you know, 99% of the time it's going to work correctly, but 1% of the time the other code path finishes first and you get a bug. bug because of it. Um, I've always been racy, and now LLMs don't let us ignore that. I expect our direction for the next release will be to tweak the reviews a little bit more, but to start shifting focus to letting the LLMs take care of the busy work— managing patchwork, automating common process complaints, editing commit messages, and maybe, maybe applying patches which already got reviewed by tags from people we trust. So really interesting to see that the kernel is one, feeling the heat, feeling the problems of code being written so easily and so quickly, but also they've got some ideas for how to get over the hill and put the AI to work, make the AI part of the solution as well as it was part of the problem. And then there's a second also AI-related story, and that is that Torvalds, had a problem and he wrote some code to fix it.

Jonathan Bennett [01:07:56]:
And that's because he is running an Intel Arc Xe video card on his primary dev computer. And it was causing him problems. And he said it was the debug session from hell, but it was enormously helped by an AI doing much of the grunt work. Apparently, the way that he was doing this was, you know, and this is sort of a technique that I've used as well. It's, hey, AI, here's the problem. Do you have any ideas? Okay, now let's start adding debug code. And this is something the AI can do very quick. Like, it's just grunt work.

Jonathan Bennett [01:08:37]:
It's boring to do. The AI can do it quickly and can probably do a better job just because it's so boring. You end up writing dumb messages. Like, my, my, um, traditionally my debug message of, you know, did the code get here before it errored out, is literally just here 1. It's like here 2, here 3. And I would just sprinkle these throughout the code so that I can actually watch in the debug output where something is getting to. It's like, that's the dumb way to do it. The AI can do it better.

Jonathan Bennett [01:09:08]:
It can actually put more interesting things in there. It can you know, more variable values that you can have more idea what's going on. But Torvalds tells the story and he says, the AI several times stated flat out that this thing we were trying to do is impossible and unsolvable and we should just write a report about it. He says, I suspect those things have been trained by people who are not quite as stubborn as I am. But while the AI was ready to give up several times, it did keep adding debug code and analyzing it faithfully when I pushed. Credit where credit is due. And then the answer, and this was what happened so much of the time, it's basically a one-liner fix. It's a bogus round up to round down.

Jonathan Bennett [01:09:50]:
And so it's around, it was literally a rounding error. But he says there were 24 more patches adding debug information to all of this and 18 kernel boots to finally narrow it down, which is just hilarious to me. I'm glad to know I'm not the only one that goes through that much trouble trying to understand a bug. But Torvalds has written some code and pushed it to the kernel, which he doesn't do very often because he normally just answers emails, which I don't know, he seems to have thrived at that new job of answering emails instead of writing code. But when I answer too many emails in a row and I haven't written any code, I really start to miss it. And I got to go back and write some code to keep my sanity.

Ken McDonald [01:10:30]:
So my question is, is there still code in the Colonel, for supporting this.

Jonathan Bennett [01:10:36]:
I don't know. What is it?

Ken McDonald [01:10:37]:
It's a US Robotics modem. I don't—

Jeff Massie [01:10:41]:
your green screen is, uh—

Jonathan Bennett [01:10:43]:
Yes, your, your, your US Robotics modem must be dead because it's a ghost. We can see through it.

Jeff Massie [01:10:49]:
Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [01:10:51]:
Let's see. What, what, what, what is it?

Ken McDonald [01:10:59]:
Let's see here.

Jonathan Bennett [01:11:00]:
Uh, What kind is it? A, um, like literally dial-up modem?

Ken McDonald [01:11:08]:
Trying to think how to do this.

Jeff Massie [01:11:10]:
Ah, you have to turn off your chroma key. What, what kind of interface is that? PCIe it plugs into, or is that—

Jonathan Bennett [01:11:21]:
I don't think that's PCIe.

Jeff Massie [01:11:23]:
Or is that like an ISA, or what it Probably a PCI modem.

Ken McDonald [01:11:30]:
I don't know if you can make it out there now or not.

Jonathan Bennett [01:11:33]:
No, not really.

Jeff Massie [01:11:35]:
Yeah, it's— we see the solder joints pretty well and we see the connector, but—

Jonathan Bennett [01:11:44]:
That's a great background, Ken. You should run that for your whole background. That's awesome.

Ken McDonald [01:11:49]:
There, can you now make it out?

Jeff Massie [01:11:50]:
Now for those listening, Ken hit warp speed. But, uh, oh, there we go.

Jonathan Bennett [01:11:58]:
I see that it's UL listed, but what's the connector on it?

Ken McDonald [01:12:07]:
Yeah.

Jeff Massie [01:12:07]:
No, that plugs into the PC motherboard.

Jonathan Bennett [01:12:09]:
Is it PCI? I'm guessing it's old. It's old.

Ken McDonald [01:12:11]:
Yeah.

Jeff Massie [01:12:11]:
Oh, I was gonna even maybe ISA or—

Ken McDonald [01:12:16]:
yep.

Jeff Massie [01:12:18]:
So it's PCI.

Jonathan Bennett [01:12:22]:
You know, those things were always iffy to, particularly the one that—

Ken McDonald [01:12:25]:
I'm not sure if it's one of the old WinModems or not.

Jonathan Bennett [01:12:28]:
Yeah, I was going to say the old WinModems, they were always, they were sketchy for getting working on Linux.

Ken McDonald [01:12:36]:
There we go.

Jonathan Bennett [01:12:38]:
They would, in fact, I want to say sometimes they would show up as audio drivers because that's literally the way that they worked. So I don't know. You'd have to plug it in to find out. If you have a modern computer running a modern kernel that's still got the right slot for it, plug it in and see. Let us know.

Jeff Massie [01:12:57]:
You're going to be on pretty old hardware.

Ken McDonald [01:12:58]:
And then see if I can receive a fax.

Jonathan Bennett [01:13:01]:
I guess. Yeah. Do you have a phone line anymore?

Ken McDonald [01:13:03]:
If I can find software for that.

Jonathan Bennett [01:13:05]:
If you can find a phone line, goodness.

Jeff Massie [01:13:08]:
Who's going to be sending you the fax?

Ken McDonald [01:13:11]:
My printer. I think it's got a fax connection on it.

Jonathan Bennett [01:13:15]:
Now you need 2 phone lines.

Ken McDonald [01:13:17]:
Now, one phone line straight from one end to the other.

Jonathan Bennett [01:13:20]:
That doesn't work. You got to have some voltage in there somewhere. Phones are weird. You got to have a line level voltage for it to be able to send something. You can get kits that would let you do that. But yeah, you would have to have line level voltage and ringing voltage, I think, to make that work.

Ken McDonald [01:13:40]:
Probably.

Jonathan Bennett [01:13:40]:
It's more complicated than you would think. You can't just plug the one into the other and make it work.

Jeff Massie [01:13:45]:
Yeah, they were never designed for that.

Ken McDonald [01:13:46]:
It's not like Ethernet.

Jonathan Bennett [01:13:47]:
It's not like Ethernet.

Ken McDonald [01:13:48]:
No. Nope.

Jonathan Bennett [01:13:49]:
Absolutely.

Jeff Massie [01:13:50]:
See, and I never used one of those old ports for— back when they were going, I was on Amigas and all mine were like serial connections and stuff to an external bit of hardware.

Ken McDonald [01:14:03]:
Yep. All right.

Jonathan Bennett [01:14:04]:
Well, I think that is it for That's it for our stories. We're gonna come back and talk about something that is like Ethernet as we get into our command line tips. We're gonna first take our last break of the show, but don't go anywhere. We'll be right back. All right, Jeff's got our first tip. And my notes here say that you're talking about mini DLNA. And I thought I knew what that was until I went and clicked at it. And then I was very confused.

Jonathan Bennett [01:14:27]:
So take it and let us know, what are we looking at? All right.

Jeff Massie [01:14:31]:
So, you know, on this show, we've talked about Plex some since Ken and I both run it. We've also talked about Jellyfin, which is— it's kind of an open source version of Plex, sort of. I mean, it's along the same veins, but it's not derived from Plex. You know, Jellyfin's historically had a few more rough edges, but a lot of people love it and it's getting better all the time. So it's getting close. And they're— they— what they are or can be used as is DLNA servers. Well, DLNA stands for Digital Living Network Alliance, which is a set of standards that lets you share and stream music, photos, videos between devices over your home Wi-Fi or wired network. It allows computer, phone, or storage drive to send media directly to a smart TV, a game console, Roku box, so on, without extra applications.

Jeff Massie [01:15:31]:
Sometimes though, when you want to stream a DLNA device or stream to a DLNA device without a ton of overhead, it's something like you don't need a full-fledged Plex or Jellyfin server. In that case, there's Mini DLNA. It's a dead simple DLNA and UPnP-AV server. And these days, a lot of distros package it under the name of ReadyMedia, but the config files and the service still go by MiniDLNA. ReadyMedia and MiniDLNA, same thing. Now, I'm not going to go into the install as The major Linux distributions have directions. I do want to be clear about what this is and what this isn't. So what this does have is low overhead local media service, simple folder-based administration.

Jeff Massie [01:16:31]:
You know, it works with many existing DLNA clients, no user account layer required, and useful for modest server hardware. It does not take much to do this. Now what it is not— there is no full media management web interface. This is all command line. No routine server-side transcoding. If your device does not handle the format you have, Mini DLNA is not going to transcode. Where the— that's where you get some of the Plex complexity in for like the Plex and the Jellyfins where they can transcode. That's not what this is.

Jeff Massie [01:17:11]:
Uh, playback depends on client codec support. So that's kind of what I just said, is if it can't handle the file format you're sending, that's it, you're done. Uh, and discovery can be affected by LAN isolation. And basically, how easy is it to get from point A to point B on your local network? And to stress this, this is also for It's just for local use case. And in the documentation, they tell you, do not expose this to the external internet. You know, keep your router port forwarding disabled, limit service interfaces, use firewall rules, you know, whatever's appropriate for your trusted LAN. Because the whole no user account layer required, this is just to stream files locally. So there's— None of the security overhead.

Jeff Massie [01:18:03]:
There's no complex anything in there. If you enable the library, everybody that has access to your machine can see what files you have. So if you have some private files, don't put it on this if you're worried about people seeing it. That's not the use case for this mini DLNA. Uh, take a look at the article in the show notes, and if this is what you need for your home, Then give Mini DLNA a look since, you know, it can run on some pretty minimal hardware. And sometimes you have use cases where it's like, I'm just trying to get my file from my computer to my TV and that's all I need. So give it a look and happy streaming.

Jonathan Bennett [01:18:46]:
Yeah, I'll have to play with this. That sounds like it could be really, really interesting for moving stuff around on a whim.

Ken McDonald [01:18:54]:
Yep.

Jeff Massie [01:18:54]:
Yeah, it's, you know, it's sometimes it's just easier than, or maybe you have something that doesn't have a TV, maybe it doesn't have a Plex codec or Jellyfin codec, and that's what you're running, but it can discover, um, Mini DLNA and makes it, uh, makes it handy.

Ken McDonald [01:19:13]:
Yeah, old Raspberry Pi can have the Mini DLNA and the USB, uh, external USB drive hanging off of it.

Jeff Massie [01:19:25]:
Yeah, it's, it's really the, the limiting factor on the hardware is not really CPU, it's network and the drive. How fast can it, depending what you're sending, how fast can it pull the data from your storage to dumping it on your network?

Ken McDonald [01:19:38]:
And then go to your— so I could go to my Sony DVD player that I've got that I know supports DNA and then pull it up and find out whether or not that particular format Can be played on the DVD player.

Jeff Massie [01:19:55]:
Yep.

Jonathan Bennett [01:19:55]:
Yeah, absolutely. All right.

Ken McDonald [01:19:58]:
But it would be if you had VLC running on it.

Jeff Massie [01:20:01]:
Probably.

Jonathan Bennett [01:20:02]:
I mean, VLC is the VideoLAN client. It's, that's, that's the sort of thing that it's designed for. Uh, all right. Up next, I'm over here playing with photos of my fan setup. Up next, Ken is going to talk about our Yes, I am.

Ken McDonald [01:20:20]:
And with Rclone, um, last week I covered how to use, uh, the rclone list remotes to list all the remotes in your Rclone config file. This week I'm going to cover how you can mount those remotes on a mount point for easier access using the rclone mount command. Now it allows you, uh, to mount any of the Rclone's cloud storage systems as local file systems in Linux using the file system in user space. Let me go ahead and bring up my terminal here so I can demonstrate. And is that going to be big enough for everybody to see?

Jonathan Bennett [01:21:03]:
Probably not.

Ken McDonald [01:21:08]:
That better? Or do I need to—

Jonathan Bennett [01:21:15]:
We don't see it at all yet. I'm trying to hit the right button to get the logo out of the way. And I've not found it yet.

Jeff Massie [01:21:28]:
Zoom it up a ton, Ken.

Ken McDonald [01:21:31]:
Actually—

Jonathan Bennett [01:21:31]:
Hit enter a few times, actually. I think it's probably what we need to do.

Ken McDonald [01:21:38]:
No, you're not seeing my background.

Jonathan Bennett [01:21:40]:
We're not seeing you. We're not seeing you at all. That's why.

Ken McDonald [01:21:43]:
You're seeing me, but that's all you're seeing.

Jonathan Bennett [01:21:46]:
Right.

Jeff Massie [01:21:46]:
It's just a blank screen. But it looks like there's some text really small in the upper left corner.

Ken McDonald [01:21:55]:
That's the logo.

Jeff Massie [01:22:02]:
Hit something like FastFetch or NeoFetch and see if you're on the right screen.

Ken McDonald [01:22:16]:
There we go.

Jonathan Bennett [01:22:16]:
There it is. That's perfect.

Ken McDonald [01:22:21]:
Okay. But I've gone ahead and listed my home directory, and one of the folders or directories that I've got here is the external. So let me go back and list what's in there. And it's called external because it's used for mapping folders from my ThinkCenter. And when I'm running it, the Pi to this system— Pi's off right now, so there's nothing in either— in it. But if I go to list the, uh, remote ThinkCenter, you see that. Now what I'd like to do is in this folder Go ahead, and I'm gonna create a mount point for my Google Drive using the command mkdir, which I'm going to recommend go back and watch episode 66 where we talk about it, so I don't have to talk about it today. So now that I've made that You'll see I've got Google Drive there.

Ken McDonald [01:23:48]:
But right now there's nothing there. So I'm going to use the rclone mount command. Now it has, uh, several, uh, options that you can include. Let me go ahead and paste it in. For those of y'all listening, I just pasted in the command rclone mount google-drive colon, and then I'm telling it to mount it to my home slash external slash Google Drive with some flags to run it. rclone is a daemon, and then I set the vsf cache mode to write. That way it caches the files locally and allows normal read/write operations. Or you could set that to full if you want.

Ken McDonald [01:24:45]:
Now let's go ahead and hit enter.

Jonathan Bennett [01:24:50]:
Yes, I'm—

Ken McDonald [01:24:50]:
It's going to take it a minute. And now we go back and list external, and that's my Google Drive. So I could actually potentially run or manage, go in, delete stuff.

Jonathan Bennett [01:25:11]:
Uh-oh.

Ken McDonald [01:25:15]:
And you could do that with any of the, uh, cloud services that you may have set up for, uh, with Rclone to manage. Now when you're done, you do want to unmount that. And the reason why is that you don't want to just leave it hanging there and arbitrarily boot with a possibility of something not being fully written. So to unmount it, you're going to use the fuser mount, which I forgot to look up. And once it's unmounted, there you're back to nothing. And of course, we've covered, uh, How to remove directories in the past. So you can do that. But of course you're going to want to—

Jeff Massie [01:26:17]:
oops—

Ken McDonald [01:26:17]:
Use the rm directory in there. I'm going to tell it to remove home/external/google-drive. And again, I'll do a listing. And now you see there's no such file or directory. But I did not delete anything else. That's the advantage to using the rm— remove directory, or rmdir, instead of the rm command.

Jonathan Bennett [01:26:47]:
There you go.

Ken McDonald [01:26:48]:
Down and dirty way to mount your cloud service so you can manage it as if it's a local file system.

Jonathan Bennett [01:26:55]:
It's really useful. Also, it's a great way to get files back. If you accidentally deleted something, you can get your snapshot back without having to do like an entire, you know, rclone it back the other direction with everything.

Ken McDonald [01:27:08]:
Yep.

Jonathan Bennett [01:27:08]:
So yeah, super useful. All right. I've got a command line tip that we have not covered, and I'm sort of surprised that we had not covered it. This is one that you can really break your computer with if you're not careful. So do keep that in mind. Make this a bit bigger. There we go. And that is i2cdetect.

Jonathan Bennett [01:27:35]:
And the first command to run is i2cdetect -l, and that's going to list the devices that you have, and it'll show all of the I2C devices on your machine. I2C, by the way, or I squared C, you sometimes hear it called, is like a serial bus for embedded electronics. So you get a lot of sensors end up being on those serial buses. I ran the second command here, and that's i2cdetect and then the number. And so let's pick one of these. We're going to try it. I could run like i2cdetect 0 and that's going to run it. Yeah, I need to run it as root.

Jonathan Bennett [01:28:32]:
It'll then say this could be dangerous. This might confuse your I2C bus. Actually, I ran this on the machine behind me and it turns out that the I2C bus I was on Then was my video card. And so the whole screen froze for about 30 seconds when I did this. We're gonna, we're gonna throw caution to the wind and be brave. If I disappear or you stop hearing me or any of those things, that's because this was something important. Let's see if it finds anything. Yeah, okay.

Jonathan Bennett [01:29:01]:
So we've got, uh, we've got some interesting data here. Um, I'm trying to remember what the, the the blanks versus the dashes mean. And I want to say that is nothing was found. And then the dashes may mean that you got back like a null value. So there isn't anything that it wants to talk to us on any of those, any of, any of those addresses. And so this is, this is the way that I2C works. You send out essentially a packet over the wire and you have an address that you assign it to. Essentially here, we're just sending a ping to each of those addresses and saying, hey, is there anything there that'll talk to us? We didn't actually get anything back on any of these.

Jonathan Bennett [01:29:48]:
Like I said, it is possible to really break your machine doing this, so I'm not going to continue probing around on things. But that is i2cdetect. Run that on a Raspberry Pi sometime and you'll see some interesting devices there for sure. But yeah, i2cdetect, that is my command line tip. And then I've got a link off to a website with some more info on it.

Ken McDonald [01:30:11]:
And I think my Google-fu says that the dash dash means no device or chip is present at the address indicated for that column and row reference.

Jeff Massie [01:30:26]:
Right.

Jonathan Bennett [01:30:27]:
Yeah, I think the double dash means no device and I think the blank just means that it didn't get a response back or maybe it didn't even try that address at all, although that's not what it said it was going to do. It said it was going to probe addresses ranges 0x08 through 0x77. So that should have been most of them. But I don't know, that's different than I've ever seen. And, you know, of course, your results will vary based on what hardware you've got.

Ken McDonald [01:30:54]:
But if it says UU for that particular location, leave that one alone.

Jonathan Bennett [01:31:00]:
What does the UU mean? I don't remember.

Ken McDonald [01:31:02]:
Address is already in use by an active kernel driver.

Jonathan Bennett [01:31:05]:
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Well, I think you wouldn't be able to touch it then. It just wouldn't. I don't think the kernel will let you.

Ken McDonald [01:31:15]:
Google says do not try to use it manually.

Jonathan Bennett [01:31:21]:
That's probably fair. I would agree with that. Just don't try. Decent chance you'll break your computer.

Ken McDonald [01:31:27]:
With a link to die.net.

Jonathan Bennett [01:31:30]:
I will say also that, like, do note, folks out there listening, that messing around with I2C is one of the few ways that you could legitimately permanently mess something up. There are very few ways that you could permanently cause problems to your machine, but messing around with I2C buses is one of those ways that you potentially could. Because that's, in a lot of cases, the I2C bus is what you use to do firmware updates. And so, yeah, proceed with a bit of caution, I would say. But yeah.

Ken McDonald [01:32:07]:
Do it on an old system that you don't need anymore.

Jonathan Bennett [01:32:11]:
Yeah, that's fair. That's a good way to do that.

Jeff Massie [01:32:13]:
If you brick it, you won't cry.

Jonathan Bennett [01:32:15]:
Indeed. Indeed.

Ken McDonald [01:32:17]:
Especially if it's already been acting like it was bricked. You may get it back.

Jonathan Bennett [01:32:24]:
Yeah, you may learn something. Sometimes the lessons are painful, but you'll learn something.

Jeff Massie [01:32:29]:
Those are the ones you remember.

Jonathan Bennett [01:32:31]:
That's true. Absolutely. Absolutely. All right. I'm going to give each of the guys a chance to plug something if they want to. We'll let Ken go first. What do you have for us here at the end of the show?

Ken McDonald [01:32:41]:
Well, I'm going to go back to the old standby today. Backup. Backup, backup, and definitely have a backup plan.

Jonathan Bennett [01:32:53]:
Have a backup plan. Absolutely. All right. And Jeff, do we have poetry?

Jeff Massie [01:33:01]:
We do. I was going to mention, if you try to friend me on LinkedIn, I am on there. You need to mention something about the Untitled Linux Show or else I'll probably just ignore it because I get So many, uh, spammers and whatnot trying to connect. And so mention it if you want to connect, but I don't really post anything, so it's a pretty boring follow. But we do have poetry this week. Wires like a maze tripping on my tech devices. Bluetooth, where are you? Have a great week, everybody.

Jonathan Bennett [01:33:40]:
I love it.

Jeff Massie [01:33:42]:
All right.

Jonathan Bennett [01:33:42]:
Thank you guys for being here. I appreciate it very much. As far as me, I normally would have Hackaday back in the background, but I've got the wrong page pulled up. I think you see where I was trying to log into Steam. Realized I wasn't logged in, went to check something. We talked about gaming and I went to check something on Steam anyways. But you can follow me at Hackaday. That is where Floss Weekly lives these days, and we are, uh, we're having a lot of fun over there.

Jonathan Bennett [01:34:09]:
Have some really interesting interviews, uh, and some new ones coming up in the future. And, uh, yeah, other than that, we just want to say thank you to everybody that watches or listens, whether you get us live or on the download. We appreciate it, and we'll be back next week on the Untitled Linux Show.